The demonisation of the white working class

The ‘white working class’ is a bit of a strange concept. As a new policy brief, Class, Race and Inequality in Northern Towns, points out, the focus on it can obscure the obvious: that the British working class, while still mainly white British, is increasingly racially and ethnically diverse.

So what’s going on here? Why is the whiteness of the majority of the working class being singled out? Why has an element of identity politics crept into the concept of class?

For those now dedicating their lives to overturning the 2016 EU referendum result, the answer is as simple as it is conspiratorial: the white working class – or better still, the whiteness of the working class – has been cultivated by the supposedly racist, right-wing elite pulling the strings of Brexit. They have racialised class grievances, and trained the ire of a section of gullible proles on the figure of the migrant, the non-white outsider. Or so the story goes.

And you can see why a liberal, left-leaning section of Remainers might like this story. It allows them to explain away the support of many working-class voters for Brexit as the product of a racism manipulated into being by Nigel Farage and his ‘Breaking Point’ poster. It allows them to dismiss the fact that social classes D and E (semi-skilled and manual workers, pensioners, lowest grade workers, and the unemployed) really did back Leave by a huge 64 per cent, on the grounds that, well, a lot of them were white. And it allows them to state that many working-class people’s careful, considered decision to vote to leave the EU was not worth the ballot paper it was written on.

It’s a shameful distortion of the truth. For the idea of the white working class was not a product of scheming right-wingers. It was created, rather, by the liberal establishment itself, through its decades-long demonisation of working-class white people.

We know the infamous and insidious cultural forms this took, from the labelling of any white working-class youth with a hint of Burberry as a ‘chav’ to the endless TV shows documenting working-class families’ preference for chicken nuggets over slender-stem broccoli. We remember, too, the ceaseless lifestyle interventions of New Labour, where few everyday habits and rituals, from having a smoke to raucous behaviour during the football, escaped officialdom’s censure.

But, above all, we recall the moment that the alleged racism, and therefore the whiteness, of the working class, after years of elite insinuation, became its officially defining characteristic – namely, with the publication of the Macpherson report in 1999 on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. For it was with Macpherson, and the establishment response to his report, that the white working class fully emerged, in place of the British state, as the ‘unwitting racist-in-chief’ of British society. The racist thugs who murdered Lawrence had been transformed into representatives not just of the entire community of Eltham in south London where they came from, but also of the white working class in general. Hence a typical media report of the time in the Daily Mirror had a reporter descending ‘INTO HELL’ on a south London estate, and discovering ‘racism seeping from every pore’ of this ‘E-reg Escort land’.

Such journeys into Britain’s working-class heart of darkness, or Brexitland, as some now refer to it, have been regularly undertaken by middle-class politicos and journalists ever since. They usually occur after something terrible has happened. The murder of a young boy, the terrible neglect of a baby, or, er, a vote to leave the European Union. But the Macpherson report was the key, the license the British establishment needed to move in on the social constituency from which it was, by the late 1990s, so thoroughly estranged.

From that point on, the white working class emerged as a distinct object, one forged through the derision, policy interventions and official anti-racism of Britain’s cultural and political elites. They built it up as a category of the badly fed, uncouth and racist in order to knock it down. Thus its constituents’ speech required checking, their views policing, their lifestyles ‘de-normalised’. Shamefully, New Labour even weaponised immigration, in the name of the ‘social benefits’ of multiculturalism, against the seemingly backward, racist white working class.

The white working class, as a distinct cultural identity, was conjured into being, then, by the establishment itself. And because it was first created as an object of contempt, a thick, racist morass of Sharons and Garys, and, later, Jade Goodys, so it was bound to provoke a defence of the white working class as a cultural identity – as a way of life with its own intrinsic value and therefore one deserving of as much respect as those of BAME communities. So the white working class became a cultural identity to be defended only because it had already been damned, demonised and, crucially, racialised and reified as such by the liberal establishment, led by the Labour Party.

Ironically, given the volume of Remainer commentaries on the prominent role white identity politics supposedly now plays, Brexit, as a political demand, is opposed to identity politics, racial or otherwise. That’s because Brexit voters do not want to have their identities recognised and esteemed by those in power. They want power itself. They want, as the slogan goes, to take back control.

Claire D

25th August 2019 at 12:01 pm

This is a bit late but still.

On a personal note; I am profoundly middle class but I was lucky enough to grow up amongst ‘ the white working class ‘ in the classroom and socially. I was always treated as a sort of friendly alien with kindness, tolerance and wry amusement.
I think the white working class are the bedrock of Britain, throughout history they have been used and abused; as cannon fodder, for profit, entertainment and as scapegoats. Thatcher hated them, Blair and Brown also in a covert way.
Their instincts tend to be right and I hope that Parliament finds a way to honour them.

Hana Jinks

25th August 2019 at 12:16 pm

Thos is the post I’ve been waiting for, Claire. I understand that you brits are seemingly obsessed by it…l find to be even discussing it…

We Aussies is obviously different, …but I’m really interested in how it can be even brought up…sorry, but isn t that bad manners?

Lol…this is incomprehensible, so thanks for any info.

Claire D

25th August 2019 at 1:27 pm

You’ve lost me Hana.

Claire D

26th August 2019 at 3:19 am

If I have genuinely offended you Hana by my comment then I am sorry for that, it was definitely not my intention.
Best wishes.

Claire D

26th August 2019 at 3:37 am

Class : I think it is different here in the UK. Class is seen as something faintly ridiculous hence the Monty Python sketch. There is still unfortunately snobbery lurking in some quarters, but apart from that + political analysis as in the article above, class is’nt really such a sensitive issue.

Hana Jinks

26th August 2019 at 7:31 pm

Lol…l really didn’t mean to give you that impression at all Claire. It really is something that puzzles me. Thank you very much for your reply, and what you wrote has helped me to understand the situation much better.

Hana Jinks

26th August 2019 at 7:50 pm

I’ve been trolling Babydoll, and so have been pretty hyped-up. I really have been wanting to ask people about that question for a long time, but it had just never come up before.

ZENOBIA PALMYRA

26th August 2019 at 9:07 pm

If the ‘white working class’ are so stupid as to support the political status quo, take all the crap that Westminster throws at them and accept the monarchy and archaic, quasi-feudal class structures then in my opinion they deserve their poverty. There is no excuse for ignorance and cowardice. You don’t need a PhD and ten million in the bank to be able to defend your rights.

Neil McCaughan

23rd August 2019 at 2:09 pm

I feel equally dismissive toward the wretched middle class, especially since they have pooed their collective pants over Brexit.

These are miserably under-educated, trivial creatures, the sort who would struggle to read the King James Bible, have never listened to a Beethoven sting quartet, and are utterly ignorant of Britain’s history. The sort who think an open sewer like Glastonbury is music, write in that pompous solecism-ridden idiom so beloved of Cantor, and suppose themselves morally superior for advocating immigration to areas far from their own.

“Middle class” has become a euphemism for for simpering idiot, the sort of gullible dunderhead whose ideas are merely those of the imbecile BBC. See the entire public sector for details.

Time these overpaid, underperforming lice were sorted out. We could start by erecting stocks at every street corner, and a gallows in every market place.

Hana Jinks

24th August 2019 at 5:54 am

Details, details.

I wonder how you’d go about installing the gallows and stocks. Anyway, I’ll leave that to you.

Hana Jinks

22nd August 2019 at 6:58 pm

Gotta say that all this pommie-caste chat really grates. It’s a bit Confucian, actually. I’d been loathe up until even a few months ago to descibe it as racism against whites, but then , I’m pretty naive. And it isn’t any different to what Trump’s been saying about the J ews that vote democrat, in that it’s the same people that have bought these diabolical, leftist lies.

Winston Stanley

22nd August 2019 at 8:17 pm

Trump can go f himself and his tr ibe with him. Some of my thoughts are truly shocking – but some of them just happen to be “true”. And generally it is the REALLY shocking ones that tend to be “true”. Ironic?

Hana Jinks

Winston Stanley

I should note that was a ribbing about religious fundamentalism and support for Trump but as Hannah noted, it could have been stated a bit less esoterically.

Jim Lawrie

22nd August 2019 at 6:33 pm

The classifications reflect underlying differences, mainly in work, income and opportunity. These cannot be obviated by moving the group en masse from one column to another. That takes place at an individual level.

Jonnie Henly

22nd August 2019 at 5:27 pm

“We remember, too, the ceaseless lifestyle interventions of New Labour, where few everyday habits and rituals, from having a smoke to raucous behaviour during the football, escaped officialdom’s censure.”

I think you will find that New Labour was merely following on from the lead taken by Thatcher’s government in this area. Her government loved to police things like football matches, or protests against pit closures, or the poll tax. And she liked clamping down on “crime” in a manner which targeted the working class as well.

” from the labelling of any white working-class youth with a hint of Burberry as a ‘chav’”

Again, I think you’ll find much of that comes from right wing newspapers, the Mail, Express, Telegraph, Sun etc.

If you want to find snobbery against “chavs” and such, look there. Plus it’s those right wing outlets that love to demonise the working class as being “benefit scroungers”, “layabouts” and so on.

I’m afraid your attempt to shift the blame for the demonization of the working class away from right wingers is pure BS.

Jonnie Henly

22nd August 2019 at 5:22 pm

“For the idea of the white working class was not a product of scheming right-wingers”

And yet right wingers are the ones who go on about it more than anyone else.

Jonnie Henly

22nd August 2019 at 5:17 pm

The very phrase “white working class” is elitist and a blatant attempt at divide and rule over the working classes.

There is no white and non white working class, there is just the working class. It’s the old trick of convincing the poor people to support the rich people by pretending other poor people are the reason they’re poor.

Stop with the elitist division of the working class.

Jerry Owen

22nd August 2019 at 6:47 pm

Little Jonnie
What is a ‘right winger’ in your opinion seeing as you are obsessed with the phrase ?

Neil McCaughan

23rd August 2019 at 1:55 pm

Anyone the BBC tells him. He’s not the sort to inform himself, or have opinions of his own.

steve moxon

22nd August 2019 at 3:01 pm

No, Tim Black is pushing the Spiked! line of dishonest defence of the Left.
The Left’s hatred towards the working class is nearly a century old.
‘Identity politics’ (often or even usually dubbed ‘political correctness’) is the result of a political-Left major backlash against the mass of ordinary people (in Europe and ‘the West’), beginning in the 1920s/30s, in the wake of the persistent failure of Marxist theory to be realised in European ‘revolution’ or any real change through democracy. In shifting the blame away from Marxist theory and its adherents, and on to those the theory had prescribed and predicted would have been the beneficiaries — the workers — if only they had responded accordingly; then the cognitive-dissonance within the political-left mindset caused by this crisis to an extent was salved. [It is NOT at all the same as what the Left mistakenly term ‘the politics of identity’ to tag the new movements against the elite, on the false assumption that they are essentially nationalistic and ‘white backlash’. Trump and Brexit triumphed because the general populace have come to realise that the government-media-education uber-class has an unwarranted profound contempt for and hatred towards them; and, therefore hardly is liable to act in their interests.]
The intellectual rationalisation was first by invoking Freud’s now comprehensively discredited notion of ‘repression’ to attempt to explain a supposed impact on ‘the workers’ of ‘capitalism’ acting within the context of the family. With most workers (the group considered the principal ‘agents of social change’ in a ‘revolution’) being male, then the theoreticians had in mind the male as ‘head’ of the family. It was a simple extension in political-Left imagination for ‘the worker’ to change from being the putative conduit of the impact of ‘capitalism’ to its embodiment, leaving women to be deemed a replacement supposed ‘oppressed’ and ‘disadvantaged’ ‘group’.
This implausible and unfalsifiable non-scientific nonsense mainly festered within academia until the co-option after 1968 by the political-Left of a movement which appeared to be akin to the revolutionary activity predicted by Marxism: the US ‘civil rights’ movement. This added to the ‘new oppressed’ the category ‘non-white’, which like that of women could be envisaged as an inversion of a retrospective stereotype of ‘the worker’. In the wake of the similarly seeming revolutionary Stonewall riots of 1969, that lobby was also co-opted to further add to the abstract demonised aspects of ‘the worker’, thereafter retrospectively stereotyped as male plus ‘white’ plus hetero.
The strands of the ‘new oppressed’ combined in a new (neo-Marxist) conceptualisation to account for these political shifts after the fact, which came to be termed ‘identity politics’ (or more pejoratively but accurately, ‘cultural Marxism’, and latterly dubbed ‘modernising’ [sic] in political parties). The deemed ‘groups’ replacing ‘the workers’ – subsequently expanded to embrace the disabled, the elderly, ‘trans’ and the obese – are abstractions rather than groups per se, and in any case far too heterogeneous to be in reality ‘oppressed’ or ‘disadvantaged’; providing a window on the sophistry and origin of this politics as other than it purports.
This absurd situation arose through the political-Left’s forcing of specific conflicts to be considered as emblematic of Marxist struggle, rendering them as generalisable, with their participants abstractions. For no reason of evidence of disadvantage, discrimination or ‘oppression’, US Afro-Americans became generic ‘ethnic minorities’, and we got the extension to ‘LGBT’. The history of feminism — not just of the ‘third wave’ — is of upper-class or upper-middle-class women demanding to somehow to be the same as their very high-status husbands and males within their rarefied social milieu; which even if it could make any sense given profound sex difference, hardly was a basis of anything comparable for the great majority of either women or men. The upshot is that ‘identity politics’ is a ‘gravy train’ for the already privileged. Worse, it is an instrument of oppression against the very ‘group’ perennially disadvantaged and the victim of prejudice, which formerly had been identified as worthy of the liberation Marxism promised: the vast majority of (necessarily lower-status) men.
The pretence to egalitarianism is perfect cover for what ‘identity politics’ actually is: the very perennial and ubiquitous elitist-separatism the political-Left ethos attacks and denies; rendered a quasi-religion, being an ideology in the wake of the Christian notion of ‘the promised land’ in the utopia/dystopia of equality-of-outcome.

Jim Lawrie

22nd August 2019 at 2:44 pm

It is not just the direct attacks on the white working class. It is the decades long screeching of the hard left that from the minute the other worlders arrived they are as much part of our class as are we, and anyone who disagrees, based on facts and their experience, is a racist.

H McLean

22nd August 2019 at 10:40 am

Nothing epitomises this sneering condescending snobbery like the BBC. OK, maybe the Guardian. And The independent.

Unlike its European counterparts Germany and France, the UK has for centuries actively excluded it’s poor and working classes and then despised them for their coarse inability to improve and better themselves. The great unwashed, undeserving and base. This fermenting attitude coupled with the recent shifting of the class war to one of race and gender made it but a short hop, skip and jump to ensuring the white working class remain forever at foot of the social hierarchy, maligned and hated. If ever there was a time for a new approach in British politics, this is it.

Winston Stanley

22nd August 2019 at 4:34 pm

Brazen yobbos ought to stay in the factories where they belong. And stick to Bogna for their days off. Brexit disproves this universal franchise nonsense. And the planet itself cannot put up with their arrogant nonsense. The Victorians had it right, Britain ruled the waves. Bring back national service, that is what I say! And vote Tory, the natural party of government!

Hana Jinks

23rd August 2019 at 12:46 am

Winny.

You’re obviously out of your mind. Why don’t you just stick to what you’re good at? Ura serial-post deleter from way back, …it just boggles the mind.

Hana Jinks

23rd August 2019 at 1:15 am

Anyway, this is none of my business. You can say what you like, and l won’t even be looking into it from here on in.

Winston Stanley

23rd August 2019 at 3:48 am

Hannah, that was a sarcastic comment, as likely everyone else realised. Your mood swings are exhausting.

Winston Stanley

23rd August 2019 at 4:00 am

H, oh dear. I did not tell YOU to mind your own business.

Hana Jinks

23rd August 2019 at 5:09 am

Ok. I’m pretty grateful for someone around here to be telling me anything, at this stage.

Julie Smith

22nd August 2019 at 8:04 pm

I agree entirely. I do wonder though, as more folks from ‘higher’ up the social ladder are pulled into the ‘lower’ rungs (nearer to the white working class), how that will play…. Poverty numbers have increased according to the JRF (Joseph Rowntree Foundation)… so these newly impoverished must be coming from somewhere and I’m not sure it’s as simple as: “we’ve imported them all”.

Michael Lynch

22nd August 2019 at 10:01 am

The Labour Party has never forgiven the white working class for voting in Thatcher an incredible three times. They had to cut their cloth to suit in the nineties to win over the electorate hence the Tory lite Blair. Since then it has been stuffed to the brim with middle class, career types who have absolutely nothing in common with ordinary working people. Hence Brown’s ‘bigot’ slur and Thornberry’s tweet – they see us as two dimensional characters from the set of EastEnders – nothing more than a bunch of dangerous Plebs that need to be carefully controlled. I was looking forward to the mass deselection of these insufferable snobs under Corbyn. I guess that’ll never happen now that he’s gone all Europhile.

Jim Lawrie

22nd August 2019 at 3:28 pm

The left has never understood why so many white, working class people supported the poll tax. It stems from the left sneering at working class people for buying and improving their own houses, and the left’s vindictiveness, exercised via Labour, to make them pay for it by a total abuse of the old rateable value system. Right down to an increase in rates paid because they tiled the kitchen extension rather than paper it.

Jonnie Henly

22nd August 2019 at 5:32 pm

“The Labour Party has never forgiven the white working class for voting in Thatcher an incredible three times.”

The white working class did not vote Thatcher in though. They were staunchly opposed to here.

Unless a vast swathe of the working classes left the country, or turned in to the middle class, or died suddenly, then you have to conclude that an awful lot of ordinary folk voted for Thatcher. She was, in fact, removed by her own party and never by the general public. A very popular PM indeed.

Jerry Owen

23rd August 2019 at 9:52 am

Little Johnie relies on rhetoric and wind power mostly.
He has of course forgotten the proverbial Thatcherite ‘Mondeo man’ .. hardly middle class. There is also the proverbial ‘white van man’ before it became a phrase to racially slur white working class men working for themselves and bettering their lives without reliance on the state.
The left hated these groups that numbered enough to return a Tory government thrice !

Amelia Cantor

22nd August 2019 at 10:00 am

The racist thugs who murdered Lawrence had been transformed into representatives not just of the entire community of Eltham in south London where they came from, but also of the white working class in general.

But they ARE representative of the white working class in general, as anyone who has encountered the white working class for any length of time will know. Brexit would not have happened without them, for example.

That is why open borders are such a good idea: the growth of communities of BAME folk, who vote overwhelmingly for progressive parties like Labour and (in the US) the Democrats, accelerates the demographic displacement of whites and therefore the downfall of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. There will be no nonsense about “free speech” and “gun rights” when there is a permanent BAME / progressive majority.

Of course, Spiked support open borders without apparently realizing how it undermines their pets causes of “free speech”, “gun rights”, etc. This is (of course) because Spiked know that their efforts to win over communities of colour to the libertarian cause will triumph any day now.

brent mckeon

22nd August 2019 at 3:06 pm

Progressive parties Democrats, please. It is the party of Slavery, Jim Crow Laws, KKK was at the outset and most of its life part of the Democratic party, The Liberal/Social laws of the mid 60s were Republican originated and pushed and got through by dragging a few Democratic politicians in. Now days the overwhelming majority of the most violent cities in the US are Democratic run for decades. Also the biggest gap between the rich and powerful and the poor are in New York and California/Los Angles, both very Democratic and been so for years. Heaven help the rest of the USA if your progressive slavery party runs the whole show forever.

brent mckeon

22nd August 2019 at 3:15 pm

Are the gangs who groomed and seduced young white girls up North representative of all male Muslims? Obviously a big no, so why should 3/4 thugs from one suburb in S/ London be representatives of millions of white working class people?

Amelia Cantor

23rd August 2019 at 10:30 am

Oh, my mistake. I thought the racist, anti-migration, anti-BAME Brexit vote passed because of millions of white working-class votes. I didn’t realize that 3/4 thugs in Eltham pushed Brexit through all on their ownsome.

John Reic

22nd August 2019 at 3:38 pm

So Amelia anyone who knows the Pakistani Muslim Community or the black community knows that Both the Grooming Gangs 0r Keith Blakelocks killers ,that the groomers and blakekocks killers were represesntive if the views of those two communities

Im sorry if you have met white people who you feel have the sort of Views if Stephen Lawrence killers baring in mind it was a random attack who witnesses said they’d just have likely killed a white Perrin before hand, and had previously stabbed white oriole got no reason

You really think open border or Muslim Pakistani comnunities aren’t more sexist or homophobic then white communities have you seen the protest by Muslims outside schools

terence patrick hewett

22nd August 2019 at 5:36 pm

Dear Amelia: as a professional engineer I have been engaged with working class people all my life and I have to say you are talking unmitigated rot – you are maligning people who in general are rather nice and tolerant but they have been pushed too far and now the chickens are coming home to roost. The most potent weapon in their armoury is their vote and they are using it to great effect: yr post comes over as patronising, sneering and snobbish – not a good idea if you want working class votes.

Amelia Cantor

23rd August 2019 at 10:34 am

Yes, yes. Someone who has been “engaged with” the white working-class so often is surely to be trusted on the topic of the white working-class. “Engaged with” is a favourite phrase of the workers, after all.

yr post comes over as patronising, sneering and snobbish

yawn I notice you don’t say that it comes across as untrue. As I said, “free speech” and “gun rights” are doomed once a BAME / progressive majority locks in on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jim Lawrie

22nd August 2019 at 5:57 pm

You’re so provocative Amelia.

John Millson

22nd August 2019 at 9:54 am

Just as notable, if not more, is the age profile? All 18-34s voted to remain with the leave %s rising incrementally every 5 year period from 35+ for all social grades. Also, shouldn’t C2s, skilled manual workers be grouped with Ds & Es?

christopher barnard

22nd August 2019 at 9:27 am

I’ve lived and worked for many years among mainly white people who regard themselves as liberal.

They are intensely aware of social status and income. They are snobs.

All they want is the votes of the working class and the ethnic minorities. They want nothing more to do with them and make especially sure their children don’t either.

Puddy Cat

22nd August 2019 at 9:25 am

The working classes are probably the least likely to share an opinion. Whereas their betters rightly known as the chatterati are people addicted to group therapies and the exploration of feelings and isms I would suggest that such stuff, while not being beyond the working class, is an environment they choose not to inhabit more likely to want a knees-up rather than a sit down.

The Labour Party, socialism, has fought extremely hard over the years to try and focus the working class on their project. Have been behind unionism and infiltrated the working class environment to implant views and create demonology In short, they have done what looks like humanising rather than improving. They have brought Islington to the masses and tried to form a movement based on the thought that the poorer can be taught to be pragmatic. Holding this baton that class have tried to express their views in this new found way only to slapped down for voicing issues that are pertinent to them.

We see it in the misogynist narrative, this desire to wack a label on whole oceans of types (to the extent that we almost believe that men generally could be in league with the sort of structures and rules that perhaps only a socialist conception could think in terms of). Such an outlook flies in the face of conservatism which is private, not induced to attend rallies, covets its independence and which tends to reticent about the expression of its underlying views. What so much of the tirades against the working class amounts to is the bringing together of the murderers who took a black child’s life and the foundry worker in Sheffield as being the same people with the same life-style and outlook, calumny.

When the white working class do come together it is outrageous. When they had premature EU immigration thrust upon them their lives became more difficult to negotiate but not one thing was done by the state to help them through other than suggesting that there should not be any form of confrontation with those who, notionally, would want your job or that of your child, that you should stand aside and welcome the intrusion. It was noticeable (as the slur against the white working class in this article highlights) that our new neighbours were instantly given a uniform character of followers of faith, family orientated, who even could not be mentioned in the news if connected to crime; all in all so much better than our own lot and a type that could only improve our society. Under this blanket characterisation some of them went on to commit dastardly crimes. Were they provoked into such deeds by their misinterpretation of the gift that they had had bestowed on them, of immunity? Perhaps, in their disquiet about immigration, the WWC’s had observed something that their government had not which they had attempted to illuminate in their cack-handed way, their un-guarded and unpractised way. If this is the case then we are in the land of the conception of the working class as the transposition of Marie-Antoinette’s farm, where the animals were dressed-up in clothes, to civilise them.

What socialism has actually done is to create an environment where anything that is allowed in society has to be sanctioned and so approved by people who are riven with conspiracy, mass agreement and a mindset that wants apples only in the apples column.

We are now a nation of the phalanx. We have turgid accretions to all manner of isms which take on quasi judicial roles in forming the language and pillorying the apostate. They stand in judgement over every dot and comma and waste the nation’s time in their deliberations. Meanwhile, industry and the white working class get on with it. While industry prospers the psychological side of Britain is in turmoil. There is a lesson here somewhere.

Jim Lawrie

22nd August 2019 at 2:46 pm

The white working class also fear blacklists, because they are affected by them. They are one of the tools employed in the race war against them.

Danny Rees

22nd August 2019 at 9:17 am

“”of the white working class as a cultural identity – as a way of life with its own intrinsic value and therefore one deserving of as much respect as those of BAME communities. ”

Respect by whom?

Certainly not those “white genocide” conspiracy types who go on about how the culture of BAME people is whipping out the culture of white people.

Ven Oods

22nd August 2019 at 1:58 pm

Strange, though, that all over the world, people seem unable to get along because of cultural or even tribal differences (Kashmir, parts of Africa, Eastern Europe), yet the problem seems to lie with the UK’s white working class.
Given the levels of hatred and violence imagined by the likes of the Grauniad, we all seem to rub along together most of the time.

Gerard Barry

22nd August 2019 at 9:11 am

It isn’t just the white working class who are being demonised – it’s all whites.

Danny Rees

23rd August 2019 at 11:35 am

So isn’t that racism?

Gerard Barry

23rd August 2019 at 12:56 pm

Of course.

Danny Rees

22nd August 2019 at 9:09 am

All this talk of how the white working class have been demonised as racist.

It’s true they have.

By the Right who constantly shout about how white working class people want less immigration and how they are angry that immigration and “foreigners” have changed their communities and towns for the worse.

Gerard Barry

22nd August 2019 at 10:04 am

Working class people do want less immigration. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are racist. And here’s a thought for you: maybe being a little bit racist in one’s attitides and opinions is not the biggest sin imaginable and maybe we talk about racism too much in Western countries (note: it is only Western countries that are obsessed with issues of race and racism).

Jonnie Henly

22nd August 2019 at 5:20 pm

“That doesn’t necessarily mean they are racist. And here’s a thought for you: maybe being a little bit racist in one’s attitides and opinions is not the biggest sin imaginable”

Are they racist or aren’t they? Make your mind up.

Danny Rees

23rd August 2019 at 11:34 am

Yeah until they are “racist” against whites huh?

Stephen J

22nd August 2019 at 8:36 am

Where things go wrong with this is that chucking everyone that one disagrees with into the box marked (at best) white working class, or other much less favourable epithets, disregards in this particular case, the majority.

Ordinary folk, for that is what this white working class is, put humanity above commerce or social injustice. We think about our families, our anniversaries, our security, the future for our children.

We understand the concept that is known as life, we can tolerate humanity, indeed we actually celebrate it.

These are things that are entirely missing from politicians, especially those with a “progressive agenda”, their ideas are always based on the philosophical theory of “what if”.

Small “c” conservatism is the key to managing the future, and it always has been. The white working classes aka everyone who doesn’t cleave to lefty philosophy (?) spend their whole lives trying to build a secure future for their children, and in order to do this, you HAVE to conserve, regardless of whether you vote Labour or CONservative(tory).

The demonisation of the “white working class” is a singularly unpleasant form of elitism, and the Labour party suffer from this far more than the Tories.

I would argue that this behaviour is born out of fear that there is something unpleasant about being ordinary and being led by ones’ genetics, when the reality is that ALL that our betters accuse us of, was created by the deviants that chose to become socialist philosophers, they want to try and make sense of nonsense.

Jonnie Henly

22nd August 2019 at 5:20 pm

Small c conservatism ensures the working class, white or otherwise, remain where they’ve always been: at the bottom of the pile, ignored and dismissed by their supposed “betters”.

By that logic large sections of the upper classes are actually members of the white working class. Clearly that is nonsense.

Julie Smith

22nd August 2019 at 8:16 pm

I’d suggest it’s a shirking of responsibility, Stephen, in the first case. Fear is the second case. Having focussed on feathering one’s own nest so much, there’s a denial of the consequences.

Government don’t want to own up to having failed to manage things responsibly for *everyone* and those with money constantly deny their wealth is the result of ordinary folk (unless we’re talking luxury goods) giving their money to the business the wealthy own – thereby absolving themselves of the responsible act of paying the same % of their income in tax as everyone else. Indeed they seem to think they’ve ‘created’ money from somewhere when only Government does that so deserve the privilege of not acting responsbily toward the society that made them. It’s quite fascinating.